Content distributors including content delivery networks (CDNs), cloud hosting service providers, and other large-scale distributed caching or proxy services are tasked with delivering content on behalf of other content providers or content originators. The content distributors typically have a distributed footprint that allows them to deliver the content more efficiently by reducing the distance and number of hops that the content travels to reach different subsets of users and by providing a scalable infrastructure that can increase or decrease the number of resources devoted to delivery of specific content in order to meet spikes in content demand. As such, content providers can focus on content origination and rely on the content distributors for the dissemination of their content.
Ensuring the optimal delivery of content to all users in all geographic regions at all times is a significant challenge for any content distributor. There are many factors outside the content distributor control that can result in degraded content delivery performance and degrade end user experiences. Issues can arise from within the content distributor's own platform, the user devices receiving and presenting the content, the networks over which the content is delivered, and the content providers that encode or otherwise provide the content for the content distributor to disseminate.
Issues within the content distributor platform can result from failing, overloaded, or misconfigured resources as well as improper routing configurations and third-party attacks on the content distributor as some examples. User device issues can be due to incompatibilities stemming from the type of user device (e.g., mobile device, tablet, laptop, etc.), resources of the user device (e.g., screen resolution, processor, memory, network bandwidth, etc.), and software configurations or installations as some examples. Issues with respect to the networks used in delivering the content can be due to regional or temporal congestion, insufficient bandwidth, downed links, improper routing, and content restrictions set by network administrators as some examples. Content provider issues can include encoding content in a manner that is incompatible, unsupported, or otherwise sub-optimal for various user devices.
Since the content distributor is tasked with delivering content provider content and ensuring an optimal end user experience, the onus falls on the content distributor to identify and resolve these issues. However, discovery of any of the above identified issues is a challenge in-and-of itself that is only exacerbated by the size and scale of the content distributor. As the content distributor can have multiple points-of-presence (PoPs), each with several servers serving many user devices with different content, continually collecting data from all the data points can overload the content distributor's resources, which can then cause content delivery performance degradation. Collecting too few data points may allow certain issues to go undetected or become detected after the fact. The longer the issues exist, the longer the content distributor performance and user experience is potentially subject to degraded performance.
A secondary problem facing the content distributor is that of transparency. Content providers want insight as to the user experience provided by the content distributor and insight as to how their content is consumed or perceived by the public. Thus, content providers that rely on the content distributor for the delivery of their content expect to receive statistics from the content distributor identifying how their content is being delivered. In other words, monitoring is needed not only to diagnose potential issues, but also to identify content delivery performance to its customers on a per content provider or per content basis.
There is therefore a need for a monitoring system that provides true end-to-end actionable intelligence regarding content delivery performance from the content distributor to each end user in a manner does not adversely affect performance of the content distributor. There is further a need to expose the actionable intelligence to content provider customers so that they too may better understand their end users, content engagement, and quality of experience and to allow the customers the ability to control and adjust the monitoring in a customized manner.